1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to portable storage cases for guns, and more specifically to a hand-carried and lockable case structured for preventing unauthorized users from handling and operating a handgun.
2. Description of the Prior Art
With the increasing awareness of the number of accidental shootings, and the resulting increasing number of laws pertaining to the safe securement of firearms, the importance of locking systems to render guns inaccessible and inoperative to unauthorized individuals has grown in recent years. There are prior art devices such as lockable gun safes which render guns inaccessible. There are prior art devices attachable to guns in the trigger guard area, or in the barrel and chamber which render the gun inoperative. Gun safes are typically quite expensive, very heavy and not easily portable. Trigger and chamber locks leave the gun available to be handled, such as by small children, if not additionally stored in a gun safe.
Prior art portable and lockable storage cases structured for holding a single handgun are found taught in U.S. Pat. No. 4,788,838 issued Dec. 6, 1988 to D. M. Cislo, and in U.S. Pat. No. 4,890,466 issued Jan. 2, 1990 also to D. M. Cislo. Both of these prior art cases are capable to storing a handgun within the interior of the lockable case, but both appear quite expensive to manufacture which would translate into being relatively expensive for the consumer to purchase, resulting in many consumers choosing not to purchase the Cislo cases.
There appears to be a need for an inexpensive, small and lightweight, and thus portable gun case which not only prevents a gun from being handled or played-with such as by small children, but also preferably renders the gun generally inoperative to such a degree that the gun won't fire upon dropping or jarring when secured in the case. It is of course always preferred that a gun be stored in a case without a round in the chamber, but some feel they have a quicker response time in acquiring a ready to fire gun for their protection by storing the gun ready to fire. Although the storing of a ready to fire gun is highly recommended against for reasons of safety, there will be those who will do it regardless of all warnings against it. Therefore an ideal handgun storage case would be one which secured the gun in a manner wherein it was very unlikely the gun would discharge upon dropping the case with the properly stored but otherwise ready to fire handgun. This case would ideally be very inexpensive to manufacture, and sufficiently so that it could be utilized as the shipping box within which a handgun would be contained when sold. Since most handguns are currently sold in cardboard boxes, the ideal lockable case would be one which could be manufactured at little or no increase in cost compared to the current in-use cardboard boxes, and thereby every purchaser of a new handgun would hopefully automatically receive this type of high security case from the gun manufacturer when he purchased his handgun, and at little or no price increase compared to the gun in a standard un-lockable cardboard box.